The launch, which was announced at Amazon Web Services's annual AWS re:Invent conference, will make it much easier for scientists and other researchers to examine climate change data. The sets include information on temperature, precipitation, forest cover, and similar Earth science metrics. "We are excited to grow an ecosystem of researchers and developers who can help us solve important environmental research problems," said Rama Nemani of NASA's Ames Research Center in a statement. "Our goal is that people can easily gain access to and use a multitude of data analysis services quickly through AWS to add knowledge and open source tools for others' benefit."

The data sets, which can be viewed directly through Amazon Web Services, are part of NASA NEX, a collaborative big data platform developed by Ames to make supercomputing Earth system modeling, workflow management, and NASA remote-sensing data tools available to researchers everywhere. Ames is located in Silicon Valley and maintains close ties to the surrounding data and technology communities. Today's launch includes multiple terabytes of climate data.

NASA NEX is part of a larger effort to make the space agency's scientific findings accessible to scientists and entrepreneurs for free. "By bringing these NASA public data assets into the AWS cloud, we help NASA engage a larger community for global change impact modeling and analysis as well as data sciences innovation in general," added AWS manager Jamie Kinney in a statement.